The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Lewis Gershom’s story “The Dybbuk” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 20 December 2019. Early in 2019 I was spending time with some family members and I overheard a story about a friend-of-a-friend who, through somebody’s will, inherited a bunch of old belongings. This friend-of-a-friend assumed they were to receive something of sentimental value, or any value, but it actually turned out to be, literally, a massive pile of junk in an attic. It became …
Laura Duerr’s story “What Lies in Light” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 December 2019. “What Lies In Light” originally began as an answer to a contest prompt, but I couldn’t let the story vanish into my hard drive after it was rejected. Shifting the setting from an Earth-based volcano to an alien planet let me play with all my favorite sci-fi world-building toys: how did StellBio reach Janus? What communication challenges would they …
Geoffrey W. Cole’s story “The Martian in the Greenhouse” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 6 December 2019. “The Martian in the Greenhouse” was originally a chapter from my novel, Perpetua. In the novel, the main characters are cryonically preserved in a mine similar to the one Honoré was sent to in “The Martian in the Greenhouse”. The scene ended up being cut from the novel, and I thought the story was much more compelling …
Gunnar De Winter’s story “The Lonely King” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 November 2019. As most of my stories, this one too began with a single image, a scene, quite often the flimsy remains of a dream. For “The Lonely King”, it was an old weathered king sitting on a throne in a half-ruined tower, in the middle of a desert and exposed to the elements. With that image in my mind, I …
Jess Koch’s story “Fur and Feathers” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 22 November 2019. “Fur and Feathers” began its life as a flash fiction piece about a man slowly transforming into a tree. Both the original short piece and the final short story are from the perspective of his young daughter, known as Little Bird, who soon learns that all humans will eventually face the change into a plant or an animal. Though I …
Lisa Fox’s story “A Time for Understanding” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 November 2019. This story is a deeply personal one. I originally wrote this as a 1,000 word flash fiction piece four days before my mother died. She’d been in the hospital for weeks, declining steadily, though we had no idea why. Her last days were spent on a bi-pap breathing machine – the mask was basically keeping her alive – and …
